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I agree Mike, the design on cloudy nights is extremely complex and I honestly don't see the overall form being more significant than what you have done with the 3D printer.
In saying that, it's a hobby for the fellow, it does look cool and show off his skills but I'm positive it adds a lot of unnecessary weight to the rear of the tube assembly where there's already a lot of weight at the back when trying to get the units balanced on a mount without adding a weight bar attachment at the front of the tube, especially when hanging a heavy imaging load like I'm doing.
I forgot I have a small vixen clamp to hang off the vixen dovetail bar on the scope to drop a Kg or two under the nose of the scope. Next time.
My 80mm Megrez (original model but still nice) didn't help as I had it more to the rear on a large Losmandy plate so I could get to the diagonal to see for finding my targets.
I'm trying my best not to add too much weight, my mount is only an EQ5 PRO GOTO mount though I changed the standard RA bearing to a tapered roller unit and it runs both smoother and seems to handle the loads better. My above full moon shot is a stack of 50 images done without any form of star alignment (my locale makes that extremely difficult). I slewed to the moon, kicked the tripod legs around till it was centred (no accurate south or permanent positioning of mount) and came inside for around 1 hour and the moon had not moved from my eyepiece. Over the 50 images I took there would have been less than 0.5mm shift in all of the images in total so I'm guessing I got VERY lucky with alignment on that night.
Leo
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